Researcher * Writer * Cartoonist * Educator

Publication: Keeping Your Grass Greener

A new edition of a guidebook to wellbeing for medical students called Keeping Your Grass Greener, was recently published by the Australian Medical Students Association, and features several pages of my comics. The Keeping Your Grass Greener guidebook addresses a wide range of issues medical students and junior doctors face relating to physical, mental and emotional health and wellbeing. This is crucial, because, as recently discussed in the Medical Journal of Australia, medical students often face burnout, depression and other mental health problems, but rarely talk about the
m.

When I began work on the Comic Book Handbook for medical interns at Mackay Base Hospital, part of my research was reviewing the existing resources for junior doctors, and the previous version of Keeping Your Grass Greener from 2011 was one of the highlights. It featured a lot of short essays by doctors and other experts which offered advice on all sorts of topics related to wellbeing. With the Comic Book Handbook, I tried to use the visual affordances of comics to take a different approach, which was to present information to readers in a way that was less like an essay, and more like a puzzle or a map, something that they would feel invited to explore, play around with and put together in their own way.

I actually spent a lot of time looking at the 2011 edition of Keeping Your Grass Greener, so it
was an odd feeling to be asked to contribute to the new 2014 edition! Ultimately I was thrilled though, and I think the comics they chosen to reprint from the Mackay handbook really fit the theme and mission of the comic. It’s fantastic to see these comics going out to a wider audience, and hopefully some medical students will find them helpful, as well as a breath of fresh air in a book full of great, but very text-heavy, information.

Evan Wexler receives the main by-line for this story, but there is no accompanying text – the entire story is contained in Taylor’s illustrations – so it’s hard to know who contributed what to this piece.

Wexler calls himself a “Visual Journalist”, and most of his other work for Frontline has an infographic aesthetic, involving images which look a lot like sans-serif fonts and attempt to convey the same myth of neutrality that’s attached to typeset text.

This piece with Taylor is interesting in that it has a more tactile and subjective feel to it. The smudged ballpoint pen ink and yellowed photographs pasted onto graph paper come close to mimicking a student assignment from the years before Microsoft Office.

There’s an emotional component to the way this data is presented, a nostalgia for the “simpler days,” when sharing a newspaper photo meant actually cutting it out of the newspaper. It’s a good illusion; I found myself staring at my computer screen looking for traces of eraser dust on the images of the paper.

And yet – a closer look at these images reveals a digitally manicured sheen. The smooth gradient colours behind the drawings, the copy-and-pasted heads in the “7/10 teens” graphic, all reveal that these images have been constructed with Photoshop, not gluestick.

It wouldn’t have been difficult to digitally massage these images to look more authentically handmade, but I don’t think that’s the point. The digital effects, subtle as they are, mark this piece as having been processed, at some stage or another, but a computer, of being buffed down and shined up by a professional designer using an expensive suite of software.

There’s just enough obvious fakery here to let the reader know that, no, of course Frontline didn’t just publish scans of some graphs drawn straight onto graph paper with a BIC pen. That’s just not how journalism works.